Many bands have simply decided to stop fighting. Over the past decade, the number of groups that allows fans to openly tape their performances has grown. Along with the usual suspects (neo-hippie acts like Phish, moe., and the String Cheese Incident), indie rockers Built To Spill, hair-metal specialists Mštley CrŸe, grunge standbys Pearl Jam, and alt-country band Wilco are just a few of the acts that allow taping. Even Metallica, famous for their vehement anti-Napster stance, have allowed taping in a special section at their shows since 1991. While some bands have a Òdon’t ask, don’t tellÓ policy, others just ask for a copy of the finished product, and some post elaborate taping policies on their Web sites.

Pearl Jam’s policy, for example (posted on www.sonymusic.net/artists/PearlJam), is more restrictive than most, but not unusual: ÒPearl Jam’s taping policy is that you may bring a hand-held Walkman-type AUDIO recorder for personal use.... Please remember that the spirit of the taping policy is for each person to have a personal memory of the show. If the equipment is too sophisticated, it’ll be considered bootlegging gear and will probably not be allowed.... OK are Walkman-type, hand-held recorders: cassette, micro-cassette, mini-disc are fine. No DATs. No external mics. No digital cameras. No standing mics. No booms. No pre-amps. There is no taper’s section.... No soundboard hookups.... No video.... Trading is ok but selling is not ok. [It would be a betrayal of the band’s trust.]Ó Whether it’s written or just understood, a green light from the band clears tapers from any legal trouble.

To outsiders, royalty-free recording and free music dissemination may seem like a musician’s nightmare — thousands of unofficial, unsanctioned, and occasionally embarrassing recordings are floating around the world — but for many bands, tape trading is a free grassroots promotion network that helps spread their reputation without major-label meddling or distribution middlemen. ÒIt’s had a really positive effect on our band,Ó says Marc Friedman of the Boston-based trio the Slip. ÒIt’s a huge way of getting your band out there. It’s cheap, efficient, and free, right to the point. The Midwest is a great example: I talked to kids who drove from North Dakota to see us in Illinois because they heard a live tape.Ó Steven Bernstein, leader of the New York jazz combo Sex Mob, agrees: ÒPeople like me aren’t getting support from majors, so tape-trading is the best advertising you can get.Ó John Perry Barlow, former lyricist for the Grateful Dead and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, calls tape trading Òthe first case of viral marketing that anyone can identify.Ó He explains: ÒThe literal implication is that genetic code is being spread out over an ever-growing culture. Which is the thing that is the most valuable in an information economy, because it makes [someone] familiar.Ó

But not everyone is so enamored of the practice. ÒLots of negative things can happen because of it,Ó explains John Lockwood, bassist for the long-running Boston jazz trio the Fringe. ÒYou’ll discover bootleg albums in Europe with liner notes and pictures, without your permission. In the jazz world, sales are so minimal, that could really hurt us.Ó

Still, tapers argue that, being the most loyal of fans, they usually purchase all the official releases regardless. And some even suggest that allowing taping will stop the flow of illegal recordings. ÒI think that it stymies bootleggers,Ó says Kevin Shapiro, full-time archivist and legal counsel for Phish. ÒBecause fans are aware of the taping network — it’s so easy to get a copy of a show on the Web — they are less likely to pay for a bootleg.Ó Shiner seconds that opinion: ÒIf you can decrease the demand, you won’t be able to sell anything. So you tape something and you try to get it out to everybody. That’s our theory. No one will be able sell it.Ó

Others are more skeptical. ÒI suspect that it’s simplistic to suggest that the pro-taping mentality is some kind of safeguard against commercial bootlegging,Ó says Clinton Heylin. ÒBecause if you took an example, the [Jimmy] Page and [Robert] Plant tour of 1995, the American leg had a taper section — every one of those concerts came out on bootleg CD. Commercial bootleg — every single one.Ó

JAKE LEWIS is a talkative, bright-eyed 17-year-old high-school student with a bushy mop of dark curly hair. The Marblehead resident, along with a couple of other tapers, has set up a microphone stand in the center of a row at the Somerville Theatre to record a concert by the New Deal and Ulu, two jam bands currently popular with the post-Phish set. From the balcony, the stands look like miniature telephone poles stretched along an imaginary line, dividing the well-worn theater in half.

It’s Jake’s first time taping, so he’s a little nervous, but excited. Unable to conceal how pleased he is to be talking to a reporter, he speaks with an unabashed optimism and na•vetŽ particular to adolescents of a certain tax bracket. He has lots of thoughts about taping. ÒCommercials, videos, MTV — all that stuff seems so fake to me, so capitalist. I consider myself a socialist,Ó he proclaims. ÒTaping is free, you know? It’s all about building a grassroots movement.Ó

An hour later, the New Deal are cranking through a set of their ecstatic disco-house. A girl in heart-shaped sunglasses carves imaginary spirals in the air; white guys with dreadlocks close their eyes and lock into the heightening groove; Jake’s still standing guard next to his microphones, looking torn between his gear and his hips.

Tapers like Jake Lewis are, like other hobbyists, driven by a fervor that from the outside seems quite insane. Serious tapers are willing to pour thousands of dollars into their collections. ÒI’ve probably spent thirty to forty thousand dollars altogether,Ó Shiner says with a shrug. ÒI don’t even know.Ó Most tapers arrive at concerts many hours before the actual start time, often after long interstate drives and overnight road trips. They speak in bizarre codes and acronym-laden slang. (Do the terms FOB, ORTF, cardioid, or hyper-cardioid mean anything to you?) And the taping community abides by an intricate set of rules and guidelines that govern everything from microphone placement to the correct syntax of tape cataloguing to mailing etiquette. ÒNever send stuff in those paper-filled mailers,Ó one taper fussily states. ÒWhen you open them, the innards get all over the tapes!Ó

In other words, tapers are sort of a geeky bunch; unsurprisingly female tapers are a rare breed. ÒThere were a lot of jokes about tapers,Ó says John Perry Barlow of his days with the Grateful Dead. ÒMostly around how seriously they took themselves. But you didn’t want to mess with the tapers, because they didn’t have a sense of humor about it. I always felt like they were doing something that was way more important to them than it should be.Ó

Which leads to the central question: for all the trouble and expense, why tape? ÒIn the most basic sense, people are collecting tapes to listen to the music,Ó explains Clinton Heylin. ÒIt’s a very pure form of collecting in that way. What you’re collecting has no financial value, but it has immense cultural and aesthetic value to you as a person.Ó And for many, that is the sole reason they hunt down live tapes — to experience the energy of raw, unedited, live music at home.

But for some, the thrill of the hunt overshadows the appreciation of its riches. Jim Crichton works as the ÒarchivistÓ for two local bands, the Miracle Orchestra and the Slip. Which means that he collects and catalogues every single gig that the two bands perform. If he can’t tape it himself — which seldom happens — he has someone send him a copy. The resulting collection is absurdly large. Like many of the tapers I spoke to, Crichton has more recordings than he could possibly listen to. And if you don’t listen to your tapes, then what’s the point? ÒSome people explain their collections with romantic or noble intentions,Ó explains professor Russell Belk, author of Collecting in a Consumer Society (Routledge, 1995). ÒThey have this notion that they’re saviors or heroes, saving artifacts that would be lost — even though they’re collecting beer cans.Ó

Even some band members question this level of fan devotion. Mickey Melchiondo, half of the heavily taped absurdist rock duo Ween, is glad that his band is documented so religiously, but he sometimes wonders if it goes too far. ÒIt’s cool that all of our high points are documented for ever and ever,Ó he says. ÒBut there are a lot of disastrous gigs that are traded too.... I admit, I think it’s kinda dorky. We’re just a bunch of buffoons and we drive around in a van playing music. I mean, people tape us being drunk and sucking.Ó And though some tapers compare their hobby to the folkloric work of ethnomusicologists like Moses Asch and Alan Lomax, they occasionally seem more like pack rats or trash collectors. Crichton, for example, expresses serious regret over missing part of a Slip performance in Pittsburgh — not the show itself, but an outdoor jam session after the gig, when one of the Slip picked up a banjo and played a few tunes. Seriously. Like overeager dads with camcorders, tapers want to record every burble and squeal of a band’s evolution — even when they do nothing more than spit up.

The irony of all this is that by attempting to capture the live-music Òexperience,Ó tapers often miss out on the party. By spending so much time worrying about the artifact, they forget to enjoy the art. ÒYou’re definitely missing out on the show,Ó explains Phish archivist Kevin Shapiro, who no longer tapes regularly. ÒYou can’t give your full attention to listening to the artist, or dancing, or interacting, because your attention is on preserving sound waves — you have to think about that. There’s no way to avoid it.Ó

Barlow agrees, but he still thinks that tapers are irreplaceable. ÒI always felt that tapers were like the Tibetan butcher caste,Ó he explains. ÒTibetans have to eat meat, but they can’t kill it, so they have this other caste of Hindus from Nepal do all the butchering for them. I always felt like the tapers were like that butchering caste — they couldn’t really enjoy the concerts ... but putting up with them was the price we paid to enjoy ourselves, knowing that there was going to be a recording later.Ó